Tilera appoints CEO, announces processors

LONDON – Fabless chip company Tilera Corp. (San Jose, Calif.), has announced the immediately availability of 36- and 16-core 64-bit processors in its Tile-Gx series together with evaluation systems.

The company also announced that Devesh Garg, a co-founder of Tilera, is rejoining the company as CEO. Nothing was said of why previous CEO, Omid Tahernia, is stepping down from the position.

The Tile-Gx36 and Tile-Gx16 64-bit processors, fabricated in 40 nm, are now generally available to customers. In networking applications a single TILE-Gx36 can deliver more than 40 gigabits per-second of L2/L3 packet forwarding performance across small and large packet sizes using less than 25 watts of power, the company said. In cloud, a single TILE-Gx36-based server can provide better performance than a Xeon-based system at one-fifth the power and one-eighth the space.

In a CoreMark benchmarking exercise the Tile-Gx36 achieved a score of 165,276.25 while consuming a fraction of the power of the nearest competitor, the company said.

Tilera evaluation systems are available in sizes ranging from PCIe half-sized cards upwards. Tilera said it has is engaged with more than 80 customers including Harmonic Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) and Mercury Computer Systems Inc. (Chelmsford, Mass.).

Garg served as the company's CEO from its inception in 2004 until October 2007. He has been a managing director in Bessemer Venture Partners since then. "The strides that Tilera has made during my time abroad have been amazing; I'm returning to the helm at an excellent time and with strong tailwind," says Garg.

Tilera entered the Silicon 60, EE Times' list of
emerging startup companies at version 6.0 and is one of the longest present companies on the list. The latest
edition of the Silicon 60 is version 12.5, which is the subject of a
detailed technology and employment digital edition which can be accessed
via http://e.ubmelectronics.com/Silicon60/index.html

The new CEO has an impressive resume indeed. Tilera has always had a unique look at multi-processing.
Interesting that the same device gx36 is being targetted at the embedded networking market as well as the server market. I wonder if all of the network acceleration is an overkill for the server space. The strategy seems a bit confusing?

Tilera's Multicore Development Environment™ (MDE) is a complete standards-based multicore programming solution that enables developers to take full advantage of the parallel processing potential of the Tile architecture. More information can be found here if you're interested :
http://www.tilera.com/development_tools

I don't know the answer and the company has not revealed anything to me so far.
It could be any of a number of reasons from the personal to the political, from the mutually agreed to the antagonistic.
I'll ask on your behalf, but we may not get an answer.

Peter- The story does not explain why the previous CEO, Omid Tahernia, was suddenly pushed out? Any comments or thoughts on that? Fundamental difference in strategy? Tahernia was instrumental to scale the company to where it is now, and he had the relevant operating experience. Strange to still see founder issues at a company that has been around this long.

It seems to be a network processor designed by Tilera systems, 16 and 36 core processors operating at 64bit is a huge technical success for tilera and not even that they have shown the performance result that beats Intel based routing systems, that's really very special.